Email spoofing is a technique used to forge an email header to trick recipients into thinking the sender is a well-known brand or friend. It is a critical element of both phishing and spear-phishing attacks that can be extremely difficult for users and even the most advanced email filters to detect. Using total security software will keep your data completely protected from spoofing threats.
Why is email spoofing so hard to spot? Take a look at the following example: You received an email from support@appIe.com asking you to verify your iTunes account password. It's a traceable request, so click the link and use it to give your Apple ID and password to a hacker.
What happened? To understand the attack, you need to identify the difference between apple.com and appIe.com. They look the same, but they're not. The first example is Apple's legitimate domain, but the second is a phishing domain that replaces the lowercase “l” in “apple” with a capital “i”. This type of spoofing is almost invisible to the naked eye, and even email filters struggle to detect this type of spoofing.
The bandwidth of email spoofing
Email spoofing can come in very different degrees of complexity. While some forms of spoofing are fairly straightforward, others require a great deal of skill. There are three main types within this spectrum:
Spoofing the displayed display name
This is a simple but effective approach to email spoofing, which fakes the sender's name but not the email address. A trained user might notice the discrepancy between the display name and email address, but the hackers hope for untrained users who will focus on the display name rather than the email address.
How to display name spoofing works: You receive an email with the display name "Microsoft Outlook" but the email address is xyz22@gmail.com. The attacker assumes that most people don't check the sender's email address carefully in their hectic everyday life - and that's true.
Display name spoofing is particularly effective on cell phones because although the sender's name is always visible on the cell phone, the email address is not. This applies to both Microsoft Outlook and Gmail. Also, cell phone users are more likely to be on the go and thus more distracted than desktop users. According to Verizon, cell phone users are more vulnerable to spear-phishing and email spoofing in mobile attacks, both due to user distraction and the design of the cell phone apps.
Another tactic of display name spoofing is to use an email address as the display name. This distracts the user from looking at the actual e-mail address of the sender and also gives the e-mail a trustworthy appearance. In the following example, the hacker uses a Microsoft email address as a display name.
When combined with social engineering, display name spoofing can lead people to take actions they would otherwise avoid. For example, the attacker researches the recipient and uses known facts to instill trust before starting a request. This social engineering tactic is often used in spear-phishing, also known as business email compromise or CEO scam, in which a hacker poses as a senior executive and asks an employee to make a referral.
Exact domain spoofing
With the right tools, an attacker can send a phishing email that appears to be from a real domain. For example, an attacker could write an email that appears to be from support@bofa.com, a legitimate Bank of America email address. Only: It doesn't really come from this address. It's a phishing email that tricks you into clicking on a URL that will take you to a spoofed website that looks like www.bofa.com.
Fortunately, exact domain spoofing is less common than before thanks to the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM). Once SPF or DKIM are integrated into the DNS settings, they prevent the unauthorized use of domain names for spoofing attacks.
Cousin domains
The cousin domain looks very similar to a real domain and is sometimes indistinguishable from it. With this approach, the domain extension “.co” could be used instead of “.com”, the URL may also have a letter or a word more or less.
Let's say your company was called Maine Express and had the domain name maineexpress.com. A spoofer could register the domain mainexpress.com or maineexpresss.com and would thus be able to fool at least some of the email recipients. Or he could add an additional but plausible word to the URL, e.g. B. "global" so that it becomes maineexpressglobal.com and so on.
How to stop email spoofing
While some spoofing attacks are extremely difficult to detect, many others are easy to spot, and user awareness training can enable your staff to help solve the problem. Establishing clear procedural guidelines such as As for transfers also helps the risks of business email Compromise, CEO-B e wore, and curb similar spear-phishing attacks. To counteract "cousin" domains, some companies purposely buy up all similar domains. This has the additional advantage of reducing the risk of trademark infringement.
Advanced email security solutions can also quickly scan incoming emails for signs of spoofing and other anomalies. Protegent360's total security software analyzes the email headers to determine if the display name and email address match the company's entity model. The solution also adds an SPF-like layer to the email filtering process that detects unauthorized use of domain names and cousins.
It also looks for inconsistencies in email structure and content, including words and phrases that are commonly used in Business Email Compromise attacks. If the solution suspects spear phishing, a customizable warning banner is inserted into the email to alert the user to an alleged spoofing attempt.
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